A vacation can mean spending the weekend at a friend's house and going to the park. I think the point is 'break in routine'. You don't need to have a lot of money to do that, and I think if you explained to any good friend the need to just 'get away for a few days' they would be more than willing to help. Camping is pretty cheap, too, and it's still summer. Heck, just watching DVDs, eating some Pizza/Chinese on the couch with a few pals, and recreating that age old 'slumber party' can be just what the doctor ordered.

I'd echo what MonkWren said earlier about the counseling; one has to really commit to it for success. My wife had a very hard life growing up in the third world and experienced a lot difficult things in life. She did need some counseling when she came stateside, but she worked at it like a trooper and now she's an ABD Economist. It doesn't mean all problems immediately vanish, but it means she knows how to react and deal with them, and thus lives a pretty normal life now.

I'm just saying that to echo the fact that it works, but one has to be really 'committed' to it. It sounds like fixing that will slowly help to fix everything else.

I've no idea if you're religious or not, but quite honestly, prayer and faith has been proven to help many people in difficult situations. It's been a great help to many of my closest friends and family. Mix that with the therapy, meds, and some positive routines, mind you, and it can really work wonders.

I'm not sure how it all works in the UK, but I know Catholic Charities offers free counseling to people, so if you have one nearby and would like a change, it's worth the trip.

All these are just suggestions, but the main thing is this: there are a lot of solutions out there, there are always ways to fix things, and sometimes any excuse for a good, deep breath is just what's needed.

Had my initial appointment on 23 July and the counsellor told me that he'd ring in the next week. I rang up to be told that someone would find out and get back to me. The head of the centre rang me and told me that he was on annual leave and that the counsellor would ring when he was back on Monday (13 August).

I heard nothing, so I rang again today to be told that the counsellor was on sick leave.

What else can I do that won't get me arrested?

I live in an area where Catholicism is rare, and most churches are actually Methodist.

Had my initial appointment on 23 July and the counsellor told me that he'd ring in the next week. I rang up to be told that someone would find out and get back to me. The head of the centre rang me and told me that he was on annual leave and that the counsellor would ring when he was back on Monday (13 August).

I heard nothing, so I rang again today to be told that the counsellor was on sick leave.

What else can I do that won't get me arrested?

I live in an area where Catholicism is rare, and most churches are actually Methodist.

Go to a licensed therapist. Many places have sliding-scale payment options, which makes it easier to pay if it won't be covered by insurance. I don't know where you live, but a google search for "sliding scale therapy [insertlocationhere]" usually works.

And Hammie, you're part right, part wrong. Yes, it needs to be a change in routine, but that needs to be followed by a change in lifestyle, which is harder to do. And it requires a genuine commitment to change your life to do so, and to be honest, it sounds like you aren't ready to do that yet. Until you are, nothing will change.

The change in lifestyle would be moving out, which is not likely to happen. My parents get a lot of money (mother is officially my carer. Unofficially she's anything but) and benefits (heavy council tax reductions) for me staying at home. Those are more precious to them than my independence (most parents are more than happy to either kick their spawn out or help them move when they move out). Yes I have talked to them about it and just hit a wall of ice.

Conversation that actually happened:
Dad: You're not marrying anyone that isn't earning less than 20K
Me: What about my emotional health and happiness?
Dad: You won't be very happy when people are chasing you for money.

I've tried to move out twice in the past 10 years. The first time I was told to not tell anyone and was trying to pay everything on £50 a week.
The second time, the not very nice person I was living with walked out on me the night before I was due to go to a close relation's funeral and called my parents, knowing full well I detested them and would rather die then go back there. They took advantage of my vulnerable state (I also had depression at that time and was struggling to keep my job too so there was a whole load of ****ed up in there) to get me back.

The only ways I'm going to move out are:
1. The DWP (the people that pay my mother to be my "carer") tell mother to either let me move out or she loses all benefits.
2. I get committed or jailed.
3. I win the Lotto.
4. I get kidnapped.
5. I successfully get asylum in another country and a no extradition order so the folks can't come crying they want me back.

There's also the matter of next year when they restructure the disability benefits and everyone goes in for a thorough reassessment. I think they will stop the disability benefits, her carer's allowance and everything that comes with it. They will then be less likely to want to keep me at home as it will be less profitable.

Sorry. The memory of that utter disgrace to sentience invokes far worse reactions IRL. I sometimes forget that most people on here (compared to the rest of the internet) actually know what "disgrace to sentience" means.

You can change your lifestyle even within the confines of your parents' home. Exercising more, eating differently, sleeping differently, getting out of the house more (or less), and more importantly, changing your behaviors in a given situation. I'm not entirely sure how the mental health system in the UK works, but I do know that the more you say to yourself "there's nothing I can do", the more it becomes true. Conversely, the more you say to yourself "I can change things for the better", the more that will become true. I can see that you haven't had a whole lot of success in your current situation, and that, to me, is all the more reason to try and change things in whatever way you can to improve them.

And Hammie, you're part right, part wrong. Yes, it needs to be a change in routine, but that needs to be followed by a change in lifestyle, which is harder to do. And it requires a genuine commitment to change your life to do so, and to be honest, it sounds like you aren't ready to do that yet. Until you are, nothing will change.

Actually, the change in lifestyle is EXACTLY what I meant. First, it's routine, then lifestyle, but yes, I agree with what you've said.

And I agree with MonkWren a second time.

There's all sorts of different things you can do to make your life better, one little way at a time. Do you want to feel the rush of a new, cheap hobby that also keeps you fit? I can send you instructions for 'couch to 5K, 3x a week, 3 months of training'.

But the most important step is simply realizing that change can happen, that you can do it, and that you are able to do something, even something small, to make your life better. Like MW said, the more you say you can't, the more you feel you can't. However, the opposite is also true.

So much of life isn't what happens to you, but how you react to what happens to you. You can't change the first one, and that's what makes life unfair. But you CAN change the second one, and that makes all the difference.

My oldest daughter recently went through a bad stint with cluster headaches. (aka "suicide headaches" because they want to make you want to kill yourself to stop the pain; they make a typical migraine look like bonking your head on a kitchen cabinet door.) She spent 3 days in the hospital while a neurologist pumped her full of various drugs to try to control them. Oxygen made them go away ... But only while she was on it. The drugs did horrid things to her, and were not something my wife and I were willing to entertain as anything but a last resort.

The eventual fix came from a chiropractor friend of mine. Apparently she was all kinds of out of alignment. The frequency of headaches dropped immediately after her first session, and they were 100% gone after the third. It boiled down, as he explained it to me, to her body being in a constant state of "fight or flight" and the biological stress of that was doing Very Bad Things to her entire physiology.

Carnas: it may make sense to at least speak to a chiropractor and see if that my help you with your migraines.